Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

My Lords, accepting, as I suspect we all do, that this is a matter of judgment, I suggest to the Committee that the judgment referred to by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, is best made by a serious assessment of the balance between, on the one hand, the likelihood—although not the certainty under the provisions of the Bill—of less frequent elections and, on the other, the stability that a five-year Parliament offers and the opportunity for the electorate to bring a greater maturity of judgment because of the experience that they have of the Parliament and the Government after five years rather than four years. In making that judgment I suggest that the historical precedents since the war are of limited assistance, precisely because we have not had fixed-term Parliaments. One complaint of those who argue for four years is that the Bill substitutes five years for a maximum of five years and a norm of four years. That is the effect of the Bill, but the complaint ignores the fact that the effect in practice of the 1911 Act has been that, where a Government have had a working majority, the Parliament has lasted five years if the Prime Minister has believed that he or she will lose, which means that he or she has stayed for the full term. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord Martin, argued that the fifth year tends to be a lame-duck year—an ineffective year. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said much the same thing. It is an ineffective year because, it is said, in the case of five-year Parliaments, the Parliament is tired and expects to lose. However, you cannot deduce from that that, where everyone knows that the next election is fixed for the end of the five years, there will be similar exhaustion. In the past, when a Prime Minister has expected to win, he or she has gone after four years. That analysis is borne out by the elections of 1964, 1979, 1997 and 2010. In each of those years, the election was held at the end of five years and the Government went on to lose. An exception is the election of 1992, when the Government expected to lose and were rather surprised to win. The only other exception to that analysis, although it is not a real exception, is the election of February 1974, which noble Lords will know was held for special reasons. However, that election gives us a useful analysis of whether it is true to say that there would have been four fewer elections or whether you can count the elections and say that there would have been that many fewer. I suggest that under the provisions of this Bill it is highly likely that there would in any case have been an election in 1974 because when the then Prime Minister said, ““I want an election to determine the issue of who governs the country, the Government or the miners””, the then Opposition to Mr Heath would have accepted the challenge and voted for an election, so that Parliament would have been dissolved on a two-thirds majority basis. It is not possible to say how many fewer elections there might have been. The Bill makes the basis for Dissolution more logical and removes what we say is the unfairness of allowing the Prime Minister sole charge of when there is an election. As we know, the average length of Parliaments since the war has been three years and 10 months. I suggest that the calculation of that average term is of no assistance. The principal point against the relevance of such an average is that it takes into account all those early elections called by the Prime Minister in the exercise of precisely the power that the Bill is designed to remove. Secondly, it takes into account the very early elections of 1951, 1966 and October 1974. In that sense, the noble, Lord Grocott, is right to say that it leaves out the ducks, but those ducks are important to leave out because, in the calculation of a sensible term for a Parliament with a working majority, those Parliaments where the Government had no working majority and had to go to the country early are of no assistance.